The final release of jQuery Mobile 1.2.0 is available and brings with it a new popup widget, an autodivider and a collapsible option for listviews, plus over 100 enhancements and fixes throughout the library.

According to Todd Parker, writing on the jQuery Mobile blog:

The idea with popups is to create a flexible element that makes it easy to place any content or widget in an overlay that floats above the current page. This makes it easy to build a simple tooltip, menu, popup form, map overlay, or lightbox with this same widget.

Although developers may want to re-use pop-ups across pages by placing them outside the page container, this isn't possible since currently jquery Mobile widgets (listviews, toolbars) are built with the assumption that they live inside a page container for theme inheritance and enhancement to work. Until these widgets are re-factored to work outside of pages at a future release, popups should only be added within a page.

Listview autodividers are another new feature. They work seamlessly with jQuery Mobile's listview filter extension and will are added and removed to stay in sync with the current set of filtered items. The design of read-only listviews has been tweaked by removing the gradient from the list items giving them a flat visual style to make a clearer distinction between real-only and clickable lists.

The other enhancement to listviews is collapsible lists that reveal a nested listview when a row is tapped:

This has been achieved by adapting the existing collapsible widget and stacking up multiple sections. Another design change is to icon buttons which were deemed "too small to be finger friendly" in version 1.1. The addition of padding makes them more usable, with the option of a smaller style if required and there is greater consistency between linked-based and other buttons in toolbars. More of the enhancements in this version are discussed in the blog announcement and it has a detailed change log and several download options.

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